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66 percent of elementary students and 58 percent of middle school students regularly use a tablet. In 2013, 52 percent of elementary school students and 43 percent of middle school students reported that they regularly used a small or full-size tablet. While 75 percent of high school students regularly use a smartphone, only 42 percent of high school students regularly use a tablet at home or school.

The kids already have the devices - they just don't use them all that much for school work. Why? Because laptops in the classroom results in lower grades. And the distraction of smartphones is even worse.

The annual report of one of the largest education publishers, Pearson Education, seems to indicate they have a lot of padding before anyone hurts their higher education business. They reported $255 million in profits from higher education book sales for 2004.

Apparently, they're going to start doing their own e-book delivery program. Roughly $50 for an e-book that didn't cost them much of anything to distribute strikes me as a bit on the pricey side, though. I'd rather share used books with friends. As noted at the end of the annual report linked page, they blame lower profits on slower adoption of new books. I have yet to see a substantially different new edition for many of these text books. It all seems like a gimmick to me.

Maybe they're just afraid Google will do the searching better than they could have. This is academia after all - ego rules.

I can give my evidence for Creation. The missing link fits the creation theory beautifully. There would not be a link if God created all creatures and commanded each creature to reproduce after its own kind. Secondly, the Grand Canyon is great evidence for a universal flood as well as the dinosaur graveyards (in which many types of dinosaurs are buried and fossilized together). More evidence comes from the complexity of life. It could not be possible for life to be so compmlex unless the Second Law of Thermodynamics was suspended or non-existent. The truth is that evolution is as much a matter of faith as creation. Every evolutionist that I have read or heard about assumes many things. They assume that any facts which disagree with their theory must not be facts. I understand that these men are highly trained and all are intelligent. I will not denegrate them because I believe that they interpret facts incorrectly. How could a bird evolve? How could a dinosaur with thick dense bones and leathery skin, turn into a bird with soft skin, feathers, and an ultra-light bone structure? Consider this short paper on the termite: http://occawlonline.pearsoned.com/bookbind/pubbook s/tfc/medialib/Applications/termites.html and then explain how all three organisms evolved simultaneously since all three are required to support life. Even if one occured, how could a two or more termites have evolved simultaneously to allow for breeding? Even without a missing link, why can't science find entire lines of animals that are crossing the lines? The simple fact is that creationism answers the questions.

If you prefer a philosphical point of view, then consider this: something has always existed. Matter did not just appear out of nohwere to form a primordial soup. Either matter has always existed or chance has always existed or God has always existed. Something has had to exist to start the universe. God seems to be the reasonable explanation in my mind. Since I do not see chance mutations that are beneficial today and no scientist that I am aware of has ever demonstrated a beneficial chance mutation, I will not believe in an eternal chance. Since it has been demonstrated that life does not spontaneously occur, I will not believe that matter existed and that matter is our mother.

The fact that the earth is situated perfectly around the sun to prevent us from freezing or boiling seems to demonstrate a grand design and a wise maker. If the moon is moving slowly away from the earth each year as the scientists tell us, then calculations reveal that millions of years ago the moons orbit would have devestated all of life on the earth with tital waves and earthquakes. Only if the earth was young could life have survived the closer orbit of the moon.

You state that evolution is true. That is your right and choice. Would you be willing to defend your belief? What proof can you offer against these problems for evolution? To many people the statement that "God created it all in six-days" appears to be a cop-out. It is the only statement that fits all of the facts. I do not have every answer. I know this, but I also know that my belief in a literal creation answers more questions than evolution does.

I am not your enemy, whether or not we disagree. I have appreciated your candid and polite responses. I dislike talking with those who lash out instead of replying intelligently. Your posts (and your grammar) reveal that you are intelligent and that you have an education. Thank you for being a gentleman.

In the tradition of the "color books" of OpenGL (red, blue), there's the "orange" book, called the OpenGL Shading Language

Those figures change dramatically when you consider per capita GNP. In reality the US per capita aid level is one of the cheapest donor levels of any industrialized nation.

Foreign AID as percentage of GDP
Per capita GDP
Lets put it this way, the average dane spends almost 8 times the amount of money in real dollars average american does.

No one hates the US because they are sucessful. I don't hate most european countries that have similar per capita GDPs. People hate the US because they are arrogant and have a horrible record for supporting and aiding vicious reigmes. (Pol Pot, Sadam Hussein, bin Laden, Taliban,El Salvador, etc)

Let me know about a 3rd world country the US rebuilt that they didnt blow to shit first.

Whoever convinced americans that they lived on the best country on earth really pulled the wool over their eyes as to what a good country can be.

If you ever get a chance or are actually interested in what the US stands for pull their voting record from the UN and look how many abstentions and votes against UN resolutions against colonization and terrorism the US has cast.

Saudi Arabia gives a greater percentage of its gross national product to foreign aid that any other nation in the world. Well, it would be nice to say its all relative to the GNP, but thats not the point. The USA still spends more on foreign aid. If other countries can't give more because they are still living under a monarchy...thats their fault.

You're just wrong. Even if you take into account our per-capita GDP to make everything equal, you still come out with Luxembourg beating us by a hundred miles.

How about almost everyone?

• In the preface to Brian Kernighan & Dennis Ritchie's The C Programming Language, they write:

  C is not a big language, and it is not well served by a big book.

• When I was a high school student, my English teacher quoted us a great line from Blaise Pascal:

  Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai par eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.
  Translated: I am sorry for the length of my letter, but I had not the time to write a short one.

What else is there to say? There is wisdom in these two statements that I can't really expand on, and the trend towards bigger tech books certainly ignores.

Like K&R's book, a lot of these tech books of arcana are about highly specialized areas. Taking a random stroll down the books that have a current place on my desk shelf, I've got books on: MySQL & Perl for the Web, HTML4, Programming Internet Email, VPNs, NFS/NIS, SQL, Perl DBI, TCP/IP admin, Bash, mod_perl, Perl LWP, and others. All of these are small subjects, and at a glance it doesn't look like any of these books goes much above 400 pages. Ah, I tell a like -- the mod_perl "eagle book" is much longer, but then it gets deep into the Apache API, so it isn't exactly padded.

On the other hand, some of the longer books I've got -- one of FreeBSD, one on MySQL, Perl Cookbook, etc -- tend to cover a much wider variety of sub-topics within their stated area, but it's hard to do this in a non-superficial way. It's one thing to go down a checklist & mention every subject area (the FreeBSD & MySQL books seem to be guilty of this); it's much harder to say just enough about each area to be continually useful (Perl Cookbook does well here).

In general, there's a sweet spot between brevity & long windedness. A proper density of information is hard to strike. If there is much to be said about a subject, then I personally would rather see aspects of the larger subject broken out into a more coherent text -- witness all the Perl books that, aside from the language itself, really don't have anything to do with one another (algorithm theory, database programming, client side http, server side http, graphics programming, win32 administration, web database automation, xml, bioinformatics, etc). Is the subject is big enough & cohesive enough to cover overlapping, related areas in one text -- Apache/mod_perl being a good example -- then fine, keep them together and let the book grow longer. But on the other hand if everything you need to know about the SQL implementation of half a dozen RDBMS engines will fit in a skinny little 200 page pamphlet, then let's just save everyone some time and not try to pad that out any further. I for one will never spend my money on those 1000+ page monsters unless they're in the remainder bin & it seems like five bucks would be worthwhile if I ever have to deal with one of those beasts some day.

Check here, though admittedly you have to wonder about the GUI skills of someone who makes you click "Next" 10 times to read their thoughts. It's a decent paper, though, and cites numerous references.

And here is a decent but damned expensive book on the topic. Fortunately, a couple of the P2P application developers are good at GUI design and have made it quite easy to locate this book in PDF eBook format...

SICP is great, but it can be quite difficult for many beginning programmers. An excellent alternative that covers many of the same "big ideas" is The Schematics of Computation, by Manis and Little; I call it "SICP for mortals".

Even cheaper than bookpool...

http://vig.pearsoned.com/store/product/1,3498,stor e-3941_isbn-0201702711,00.html

$32.49

You can get the book direct from the publisher for $32.49 at: http://vig.pearsoned.com/store/product/1,3498,stor e-3941_isbn-0201702711,00.html AND it is in stock, unlike bookpool.

You can get Mandrake Gaming Edition for $45 here

Beats the heck out of the $80 or so Mandrake wants for it on their own site, and The Sims for Windows sells for about $40 anyway...

$45 here. Mandrake Gaming I personally want a separate release. My girlfriend loves this game. If it ran on her force fed linux box she would become a true believer. Anyone who cares should sign up with transgaming, and vote for them to release the game separate from the Mandrake bundle. I don't know if anybody mentioned it, but subscribers get to vote on what the company does next ie. supported games, directX version...

sorry here it is: Mandrake Gaming

This link has the gaming edition for $45. It is basically Mandrake 8.1 standard + nvidia drivers + winex + sims.

You're right, I am overreacting. I see CPRM as being very dangerous.

The "secret number" is not the key. Let me explain.

The CPRM cipher algorithm is quite similar to DES. The CPRM "secret number" is analagous to the s-boxes which are used in the DES algorithm. The design of these boxes is really the core of the algorithm. In DES's case, their design is integral to making it good against differential cryptanalysis. If these boxes are not well designed the cipher is more easily broken.

Let me emphasize, the secret number is not the key!!

P.S. I looked on Google for differential cryptananlysis, but it came back with squat. I read about it in Security in Computing, by Charles Pfleeger.